scandal

Today's New York Times carries a story by Carl Hulse and Adam Nagourney about Tom DeLay's emerging public profile with all the scandals and the Terri Schiavo case. It's chock full of quotes on this narrow question: Is Tom DeLay's national name identification numbers, increasingly negative, a liability to the Republican's agenda and to individual GOP candidates?

Gotta know that this was coming... the House GOP has had enough of this DeLay stuff. So they trump out their talking points and research report, and label any group standing up for ethics as "liberal" or getting money from Open Society Institute as somehow in George Soros' pocket. Including us, apparently. Oh boy.

My response: I'll debate the House GOP anyday on the role of money in politics, especially when they're awash in:

David Brooks of the New York Times, as Rick posted a while ago, has an interesting piece on all the Abramoff/Scanlon scandals. But the strange thing is, he writes the piece about all the news swirling around DeLay without, strangely, mentioning DeLay's role. How can you write this story without DeLay?

Ken Bode, formerly of CNN and now a journalism professor at DePauw University, pens an oped for the Indianapolis Star that starts out with language from an urgent email alert asking recipients to pray for "Christian statesman" Tom DeLay. It's reminiscent of the statements made by Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation earlier this week that the attacks against DeLay were "spiritual warfare." The op-ed invokes the late Hunter S. Thompson at the end:

I just had ten minutes with former GOP member of Congress Joe Scarborough on his radio show. While he agreed DeLay has gone too far -- citing the firing of two members of the Ethics Committee, Reps. Joel Hefley (R-CO) and Kenny Hulshof (R-MO) -- Joe basically stuck with the "everyone's doing it" defense.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay strongly denied wrongdoing Tuesday in connection with two overseas trips financed by outside organizations, and said he is eager to discuss the facts with leaders of the House ethics committee.

"I feel confident I've done nothing wrong," the Texas Republican said as fellow lawmakers and aides sought to assess the impact of fresh controversy on the party in general.

Five years ago today, at a hearing before the House Government Reform Committee investigating the 1996 Clinton-Gore fundraising scandals, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) expressed his outrage that the committee chairman, Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) had refused to investigate another scandal surrounding an obscure Texas businessman named Peter Cloeren.